LIBRARY

Portugal | Installation | New creation

“Biblioteca” [Library] is the visual artist Horácio Frutuoso’s answer to the proposal of creating an installation having its starting point the video “A Experiência do Lugar II” by Helena Almeida (part of the Collection of the PLMJ Foundation). In the video, Helena Almeida roams throughout her workshop on her knees, filling it with a series of unchoreographed spontaneous gestures, improvising this relationship with items that we can find in any artist’s atelier. This path comes close to an image of pilgrimage, or procession, where there are exhibited a series of symbols that parade honorably. Frutuoso sees it as an adoration, an appreciation of the studio – the most important space to the artist, the place where not all enter and where art works are created and for the first time revealed or destroyed.

Frutuoso speaks to us of his special interest for this relationship between creation and death: “Because I’ve had a religious education (even though I don’t practice it or am a believer), I have particular attention to gestures and rituals attached to it and that inevitably also approach art”. Questioning what other spaces can resemble these sites, he thought of a library. A library as a deposit of books, the attempt to preserve, the hierarchical organization, the rituals, the silence, the books once forgotten, the ones most requested that its pages go loose. “Biblioteca” is presented in Estufa Fria, in Lisbon, a deposit of species, of shapes, as well as an archive.

Horácio Frutuoso conceives three objects in acrylic, with three colors: transparent crystal, opaque black and translucent gray, by association with the purity of colors/neutrality and Helena Almeida’s aesthetic.